The Raid 2 2014 12

SilentDawns review:
Now is the time. The time to review an experience that will be
unmatched for the rest of the year. I've thought long and hard about
this, and it's definitive. The Raid 2 is the greatest action film ever
made. Don't think so? Name one film that has a fulfilling story,
interesting and unique characters, extreme violence, beautiful and
stunning cinematography, and easily the greatest action scenes EVER
in a film. That's right, THE GREATEST. My mind was going in so many
directions after my first viewing, and now that I let myself settle down
(somewhat), I will try to review one of the most accomplished films in
the last 10 years. And here
we go.......
The Awesome: From the beautiful and magically composed opening
shot, to the cliffhanger that sent shock- waves up my body, The Raid 2
is an absolute masterwork. I will try to separate this review into
multiple paragraphs, because there is much to talk about.
First, the story has been branched out and expanded, basically telling
the audience from the first 10 minutes that there is a much bigger
universe than Rama thought from the first film. The gangster world in
The Raid 2 feels comic-bookish in a way, adding stylized villains and
having the blood as red as can be. The story is very Infernal Affairs/
Departed-esque, but it works extremely well on its own, making sure
that you don't lose interest until the next action sequence. All of the
acting and characters in this film work beautifully into the overall
tapestry of the story, with many actors having their time to shine. You
actually are invested with these characters, and you feel every blow
when the action hits.
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The direction by Gareth Evans is absolutely impeccable. It's a

directional accomplishment so great that I could honestly see him
being nominated for an Oscar. Now, I don't think the Academy would
nominate a film of this nature, and that makes me angry. The wideshots, composed with an elegance that you rarely see until the fall
movie seasons, show true maturation as a film-maker. The
cinematography is awe-inspiring, having rich and vibrant colors pop
out in the appropriate spots. Night-clubs have never looked so inviting
and sleazy at the same time. I also love Evan's mature approach to the
material. He understands that violence is a consequence to this dark
and disturbing world, and he never uses it in an overly-campy way.
Sure, there are moments where he encourages the audience to laugh
and freak out in disbelieve, but those sections are earned. He knows
when to cut away, or when to show all of the impact in all its bloody
glory. Also, an abundance of poetic and tender moments provide some
scenes that will stick with me for a long time.
Now, last but not least, the action sequences. My word. Wow. Amazing.
Spectacular. Stunning. Fast. Intense. Graphic. Insane. Crazy. In The Raid
2, you will see the greatest action sequences of all time. As a huge fan
of martial arts and action cinema, I don't say that lightly. They are so
impressively choreographed, shot so the audience can SEE
EVERYTHING, and full to the brim of "OHHHHH" moments. I can
honestly spend another two paragraphs writing about the action
sequences, but I wouldn't do them justice.
The Terrible: If you went in expecting a story structure comparable to
the first Raid, then you might be lukewarm to parts of this. The Raid 2
takes its time to tell its story, because otherwise, your mind wouldn't
be able to handle the pure awesomeness in every frame. Like I said
though, the story isn't just filler, but a good crime story.
Overall, The Raid 2 is the greatest action film ever made. From the
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fantastic characters, to the beautiful direction and cinematography,

and of course the action sequences; The Raid 2 tops the first film in
every aspect.
Note: I will be seeing it again soon, and I will post a spoiler review
writing about my favorite parts in detail.

The Raid 2: Gareth Evans interview

The Welsh director behind the cult Indonesian fight film The
Raid tells us how he approached its sequel and what's next for
promising career.
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Its hard to describe the amount of energy cult director Gareth Evans
manages to generate amongst a room full of genre-loving geeks as he
did when premiering The Raid 2 in Sundance. The film even had to be
stopped midway as a young guy had an attack of some sort. Evans,
while expressing his concern afterwards, noted that the man was fine
and joked that he might have been from the MPAA, who were yet to
see the film. In the US, the film is going out with an R rating following
minimal cuts; the Australian release also received an R rating.
Not so much a sequel as a revised version of the bigger-budget film he
wanted to make when he was forced
to set 2011s The Raid amid the confines of a Jakarta 15-storey tower
block, The Raid 2 is far bigger and far bolder. In fact, the 31-year-old
Welshman is trying to do what currently might seem mission
impossible: achieve a broader box office with a martial arts film in the
Indonesian language.
Even Jackie Chan, one of Evans heroes, had to make compromises
when he ventured to Hollywoodand indeed that seems to be the next
step for Evans. For the moment, though, he is sticking with his famed
revival of the Indonesian silat fighting style by creating an inventive
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brand of hyper-violent cinema where you truly wonder how these lean,
elastic-bodied Indonesian men come out alive. This time theres also a
female character, Hammer Girl (Julie Estelle), who would make
Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman proud.
In Sundance I was on my own mission to discover what all the fuss was
about. Having interviewed Quentin Tarantino and Jackie Chan many
times over the years, I was well aware that both men are funny and
hyper- active as well as being big talkersattributes they instil in their
films. Evans, who likewise makes his films funny, takes the violence
further into genre territory, though does it with great aplomb.
Not unlike the fantasy-loving Guillermo del Toro, a younger splatteradoring Peter Jackson or British Sightseersdirector Ben Wheatley,
Evans is a chubby, cherub-faced figure with a gift of the gab and a wild
Welsh sense of humour. Unlike del Toro and Jackson, he does not
resemble a hobbit and is toweringly tall. The other thing he shares
with the aforementioned filmmakers is a strong marriage to a film
collaborator wife, Rangga Maya Barack-Evans, who is IndonesianJapanese.
When in 2007 she suggested they go to Indonesia, Evans, who had
watched tonnes and tonnes of martial arts movies over and over as a
childmy dad loved Jackie Changot a job directing the documentary
Land of Moving Shadows: The Mystic Arts of Indonesia, Pencak Silat.
While making the movie his addiction to silat kicked in.
Iko Uwais, the star of his subsequent three features, Merantau, The
Raid and The Raid 2 (Berandal, the Indonesian title, means thug), was
working as a delivery man at a phone company when they first met.
Uwais may subject himself to a comical level of abuse in Evans films,
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though he largely has himself to blame, as he is also the fight scene

choreographer.
In The Raid 2, Evans wanted to broaden the drama to create more of a
storyline and to not just rely on the action. I wanted to challenge
myself more, to call on Ikos own life experiences as a new father, to
call on the psychology and build up anticipation. In my opinion, the
best scene in the movie is when Rama calls his wife at home.
The Raid 2 pretty much picks up where The Raid ended, though within
the first five minutes almost all the surviving characters are killed off
so Evans can start all over again. The story follows the charismatic
Detective Rama (Uwais) over a far longer period as he goes undercover,
ultimately serving a two-year prison sentence to get to the top of the
police corruption ring by making contact with Uco (Arifin Putra), the
crime bosss son. Then he lets loose on the streets of Jakarta.
In The Raid 2, Evans says he wanted to expand the action too, by
making it different and varied and using numerous locations to avoid
fight fatigue. As usual, the scenes are mind-boggling. While critics
have praised the films car chase as the best and certainly the most
intricate ever filmed, the prison riot proved the most exhausting.
We were in the mud for eight days straight, Evans recalls. I lost a
pair of shoes and I cut my foot a little bit as well. Mud would splash on
the camera lens in an otherwise perfect take. Evans hesitates for a
moment and reconsiders. But the car chase was a bitch.
For the first time, the director, writer and editor wanted to explore
using car stunts. He aimed to create a seamless sense of motion
without the budget of a Fast & Furious movie. Employing the help of
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Bruce Laws car stunt team from Hong Kong, Evans had his
cinematographers changing cameras and even passing a camera
through a hole in the car floor as it sped along. Nor does Rama stay
still, as he jumps off the back of an SUV onto a sedan while the two cars
are in motion and he beats up the bad guys inside the car, of course.
Evans: My focus on those scenes was more on what happens to the
bodies inside the car when their car gets hit, which gives a unique
selling point to me and made it different from things what weve
seen."
Initially planned at seven hours, the car chase took twice as long to
film than expected. (The film took 132 days to shoot, 26 days longer
than initially projected. The entirety of Dallas Buyers Club was shot in
25 days.)
Every day we turned up on set at 4am to prepare to start shooting at
6.30am. But it doesnt matter if youve got a permit in Indonesia, they
can shut you down. The police can open up the streets at 9am so pretty
much
every single day we lost 50 percent of our shooting time.
Then there was the face-off in the kitchen, shot with vivid shades of
John Woo. That was 10 days of me sitting by the monitor telling them
to punch each other harder and stuff like that, Evans recalls matter-offactly. We took about a month and a half just designing it and the
guys came up with all these different movements and practiced them
for months before we shot seven minutes of unrelenting violence.
Did anyone get hurt on the film? We had a few ropey moments but
nothing was really that bad. One guy had a concussion that we were
worried about at first, but when we took him to hospital, he was okay.
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It was the first day of action scenes and Iko changed the choreography
at the last minute. The guy was supposed to get pulled down on the
table but I think he came down too low and instead of hitting the nice
cushioned top part of the table, he cracked his ribs against the hard
wood on the side. I felt bad for the guy but he came back and actually
participated in the prison riot.
Evans calls himself a disgusting control freak, who clearly suffers for
his art too. Its perhaps understandable that he wants to do everything
on his films, as he knows exactly what he wants. After viewing the
inventive ways his Indonesian fighters maim and kill, its certainly hard
to describe.
When we design the fight scenes we shoot a video storyboard in preproduction and Im so involved in choosing those shots and the edits
of that sequence to get the fight scene right. If it doesnt match the
tone of the fight scene going into the drama then maybe I feel like
somethings quite wrong. Me and Matt [cinematographer Matt
Flannery] go through all the shot lists very specifically and I can almost
see the edit while were figuring out the shot lists.
Currently, Evans is producing Killers director Timo Tjahjantos The Night
Comes for Us with rising Indonesian action star Estelle in Jakarta.
(Killers also premiered in Sundance.) Then Evans plans to make two
films outside of Indonesiamovies with a mid-range budget level so I
can maintain control while Im still figuring myself out as a
filmmakerbefore filming the third Raid instalment in Indonesia to
close off his trilogy.

THE RAID 2
Cinematography
The team focused its effort on balancing the old and the new. They
wanted to make sure the audience recognized the familiar setting from
the original, while exploring new parts of this environment. The sequel
focuses on of Rama entering Jakarta's underworld, where the stakes
are higher. The sequel was shot in cinemascope in order to provide a
wider frame and give the story a more epic feel. The photography also
explored a wider range of the color palette, using different lighting for
each character. The film opens with similar tones as the first one and
shifts as Rama enters the criminal organization.
Shooting the film has been a learning experience for the whole team.
On MERANTAU, the team learned to shoot martial arts. On THE RAID:
REDEMPTION, they learned to shoot gunfights. And on THE RAID 2 they
went one step further, adding car chases to the mix.
On MERANTAU we felt we were focusing on the narrative drama
scenes. For the action scenes, the takes were too long. We learned from
that and fixed things on THE RAID: REDEMPTION. THE RAID:
REDEMPTION had a majority of action scenes. We got to play a lot with
camera angles and fluidity. Finding a new way to shoot action scenes.
THE RAID 2 is a much bigger project. What we chose to do is a
combination of the two elements we learned from MERANTAU and THE
RAID: REDEMPTION: dynamic, edgy and fluid camera movements,
while at the same time knowing when to go for more classical and
sophisticated compositions (when to use jimmy jib, steady cams and
dolly track).Combining those two different styles was an interesting
challenge in that respect. (Gareth)
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Because this was the first time a car chase of this scale was shot in
Indonesia, a lot of time was spent on logistics. Unlike places like Hong
Kong or the UK, where they have been shooting car chases for years,
Indonesia did not have a particular set-up for this. The production team
had to build the structure itself to achieve specific shots:
"We had to have a shoot from the inside of one car going down a
highway with the camera moving to another car straight away, then
have the back window to blown out for the camera to follow through
the back window and out again. To do that, we discussed different
combinations of computer-generated imagery, visual effects, green
screens and so on. After a long discussion, we felt like we would be
technically limited if we were to use too many special effects. In the
end we decided to do it for real, meaning moving the camera from one
camera operator to the other. This is something we had done on THE
RAID: REDEMPTION when we went through a hole on the floor. It was
done in a controlled environment and the only issue was the person
passing the camera to another. But the difficulty here was to pass the
camera between moving cars on a highway. It was risky shot, but
thankfully after a number of takes it was done well". (Evans)
Camera moves were carefully integrated into the martial arts
choreography. The fighters' moves are choreographed to the slightest
detail, and so are camera movements. Camera angles are designed
before
the shoot, so it never feels like the camera interferes with the action. A
constant mantra during shooting was to highlight the actors'
performances.
"The brothel scene is one of my favorite shots, when a character gets
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thrown through a window. The camera starts low on the ground and
follows him through his jump. It ends up getting upside down. As he
rolls over to get up, the camera rolls with him and swings around to
catch Uwais jumping through a window. It comes to a close-up of his
feet and then follows him. It was a complicated shot. What makes it
even harder is that we had to do this without rigging. We had two
camera operators controlling the camera. It's not just about getting the
movement right. You also have to clear the path or we would have
seen one of the camera operators at some point in that scene. Overall
it was a great team effort to get it executed correctly." (Evans).

Review: 'The Raid 2' Is One of the Great Action Films of Recent
Memory"The Raid 2" is grander and superior to its predecessor
in every conceivable way.
When the Indonesian martial arts movie "The Raid: Redemption"
began making the rounds at film festivals back in 2011, it gained
instant popularity for its frenetic choreography, and became an
impressive calling card for Welsh director Gareth Evans.
Simultaneously bruising and taut, it was always going to be a tough
act to follow making it all the more beguiling that its sequel, "The
Raid 2: Berandal," is grander and superior in every conceivable way.
While its predecessor used John Carpenter's "Assault on Precinct 13"
as a reference point, "The Raid 2" pulsates with countless other
influences "Yojimbo," "The Godfather," "Infernal Affairs" and
contains a finale that not so much mirrors but perfects Bruce Lee's
unfinished masterpiece "Game of Death." This is a feat that raises the
bar for modern action filmmaking, and while claims of its stature as
greatest action film of all time might sound premature, they aren't
unwarranted.
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"The Raid 2" picks up hours after the first installment. Our hero Rama
(Iko Uwais), his wounds sustained from an army of thugs still fresh, is
brought before a special squad keen on cleansing the city of the
reigning mafia as well as the police force that aids and abets them. It
turns out that the crime lord Rama helped take down in "The Raid:
Redemption" was but one midlevel spider amongst a massive web of
criminality. In exchange for his familys protection from these dark
forces, Rama is asked to go undercover into the belly of the beast.
Exhausted and disillusioned by his ordeal, he initially refuses, but
accepts the task when he considers the prospects of personal
vengeance. His mission calls for him to land in prison for a few months
in order to befriend the incarcerated dark prince of the mob, Ucok.
Almost immediately, Rama realizes that this quest will become much
more complicated than that.
Evans populates this epic with a rogues' gallery of larger than life
villains, each of them distinctive and fittingly despicable. Controlling
the city are two crime lords: The local syndicate lead by the all-powerful
Bangun, and the refined Goto, who exerts an equally iron fist from
Japan. Ucok (Arifin Putra, sporting classic movie star looks), Banguns
son and the man with whom Rama must ingratiate himself, is a
petulant king-in-waiting all too eager to inherent his fathers crown, his
sense of entitlement only matched by his ruthlessness. On the
periphery is the ambitious upstart Bejo, whose arsenal includes a trio
of assassins so outlandish they could comfortably reside on the pages
of the wackiest of mangas. In a welcome piece of stunt casting, Yayan
Ruhian (who played Mad Dog in the first installment) returns,
reincarnated as another unstoppable berserker named Prakoso.
Undoubtedly the most astonishing aspect of "The Raid 2" are its action
set pieces, which create the impression that "The Raid: Redemption"
was just a warm up. Each one is preceded by a meticulously observed
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build up: We watch as some of the greatest martial artists in the world
snap, gouge, and pummel every component of each other's anatomy
with whatever object is at hand. The violence is jaw-dropping, with
every evisceration leaving a traumatic reverberation in its wake, only to
be outdone by the next gruesome strike. Evans (who not only directed
but edited the film as well) catapults himself to the forefront of action
directors, systematically tackling and outdoing just about every
benchmark for combat in the pantheon. A mud-soaked brawl on a
prison yard early in the film makes the opening turf battle of "Gangs of
New York" look cute in comparison. A car chase sequence is so
dizzyingly inventive it would send Jason Bourne spinning off of the
pavement. Rama's kitchen-set showdown with Bejos most lethal
henchman ranks among the greatest one-on-one fight sequences in
recent memory.
This is not to suggest that the films pleasures exist only when the fists
swing. Evans constructs an elegant narrative around the carnage,
extrapolating a labyrinthine plot from the first film's spare scenario
and handling the intrigue with a crystalline clarity. Iko Uwais, with his
haunted eyes and no-bullshit dignity, once again portrays Rama as a
decent man who slowly loses himself to the barbaric world he has
become submerged in.
Still, Evans risks losing track of Rama's personal stakes in this
expansive tale of ambition and betrayal, only to find him roaring back
to the forefront in the film's third act. Arifin Putra also does great work
as Ucok, his performance suggesting a deep-seated insecurity that
comes close to eliciting sympathy for an otherwise monstrous
character. However, the true stars of the film are Evans, his two
cinematographers and three

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composers the virtuosic camerawork and nerve-stabbing score make

for a rapturous viewing experience. Indeed, if "The Raid: Redemption"
was a thrashing drum solo, its sequel is the opulent symphony where
every instrument is played with fevered inspiration.
Criticwire Grade: A
HOW WILL IT PLAY? Sony Pictures Classics opens the film in New York
and Los this Friday. Strong word of mouth is likely to yield a much
larger haul than the first installment. The two-and-a-half hour running
time and excessive violence may provide a deterrent for some
audiences, but "The Raid 2" should gradually find its audiences as it
opens across several markets in the coming weeks..

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